About the School

A brief
history of the St.Paul's School

by
Rev.
Hugh Mead

Medieval cathedrals were supposed to maintain a
grammar school. There was one at St.Paul’s at least as early
as the twelfth century and perhaps much earlier. It may have
educated both Thomas Becket and Geoffrey Chaucer. By the
sixteenth century, however, it was decayed - ‘obviously’, as John
Colet, Dean of St.Paul’s wrote, ‘a school of no importance’.

John Colet

He acquired its site, on the north side
of the cathedral, for his new school.

Colet was well qualified to found a
school, being not only learned and devout but also rich and
well connected. His father, Sir Henry Colet, was Lord
Mayor of London and a leading member of what was then and
still is the premier City Livery Company, the Mercers.
All his many children, except the Dean, died young.
His large fortune was thus available for the endowment of
the school, as John Colet, being a celibate priest, had no
children of his own.

He was able to make St.Paul’s the
largest school in England and to pay its staff well, the High Master
receiving 13s.4d (66p a week), a much better salary than the Head
Master of Eton. Colet entrusted the government of his school,
and the management of its finances, to the Mercers’ Company.
They still form the major part of the governing body and administer
his Trust.

Colet intended his school to provide a Christian
and humane education. He was helped and advised in his
planning by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, the most famous scholar
of the day, who wrote text books for Pauline use and tried to
recruit for the staff. William Lily, the first High Master,
was also a distinguished scholar: St.Paul’s can claim that in his
day it became the first English school to teach Greek.

Under Colet’s statutes there were to be 153
scholars (a reference, almost certainly, to the miraculous draught
of fishes - St.John xxi 11) in eight forms. They were all
taught in one large room, sometimes divided by curtains, the forms,
or benches, rising up in tiers on either side of it. They were
to be taught free, but each boy was required to bring his own
(expensive) wax candle, a rule that was enforced until 1820.
Colet intended them to be ‘of all nations and countries
indifferently’; but in practice, as St.Paul’s was a day school, they
were mostly Londoners. They were not to be admitted until they
could read and write. They studied Latin and were mostly
taught in Latin by the three masters - High Master, Surmaster and
Chaplain. Exhibitions for Paulines, tenable at Oxford and
Cambridge, were endowed by the governors and other benefactors; they
were essential to ambitious young men without means, for whom the
Church, with its exclusively graduate elite, was almost the only
ladder to success. The names of most early Paulines are lost;
continuous registers date only from 1748. Yet we know that
before the death of Henry viii the school had educated a Lord
Chancellor (Southampton) and a Secretary of State (Paget).
John Milton was at St.Paul’s from about 1615-24. He made a
lasting friendship with the High Master’s son, Alexander Gill, whose
conversation he thought better than any to be had at Cambridge.

The first building was destroyed in the great
fire of 1666; but the school was rebuilt on the same site in 1670
and again, when the second building became obsolete, in 1824.

The late seventeenth century was something of a golden age for
St.Paul’s. Samuel Pepys, who was a boy there c. 1649-51,
seems to have played truant to attend Charles I’s execution and
later watched his old school burning. He became an
enthusiastic Old Boy. The great Duke of Marlborough was said
to have learned the rudiments of strategy while still a boy at
St.Paul’s from a book in the school library. He has, perhaps a
better claim to be considered the only Pauline Prime Minister than
Spencer Compton, 1st Earl of Wilmington, who was First Lord of the
Treasury for the last few months of his life. Edmund Halley
was Captain of the School in 1673 and already ‘very perfect in
celestial globes….if a star were misplaced in the globe he would
presently find it.’

Relations between the Mercers’ Company and the
High Masters were sometimes stormy. The Mercers inspected the
school annually, at Apposition (a ceremony that continues to this
day) and claimed the right to dismiss or reappoint the staff in
accordance with their findings on that occasion. In 1559 they
removed High Master Freeman, officially for lack of learning, but
probably in fact for holding the wrong religious views. In
1748 they removed High Master Charles, who, it was alleged, had
threatened to ‘pull the Surmaster by the nose and kick him about he
school.’ Worse still the number of boys had fallen to thirty five.
The governors objected, from time to time, to the High Masters’
taking in boarders and accepting presents and fees.

Although the school recovered quickly from the
disastrous High Mastership of Charles, by the early 19th century it
was clear that its premises were inadequate.

The
rebuilding of 1824 was on a larger scale ; but the only
play-ground was a semi-subterranean basement.

School, in 1827

There were no organised
games: Colet had forbidden ‘cockfighting’ and ‘riding about of
victory’ which he thought nothing but waste of time. John Sleath, High Master from 1814 to 1838, declared that ‘at St.Paul’s
we teach nothing but Latin and Greek’: but he said so not
complacently but with ironical regret: he had tried and failed to
get the governors to appoint a master to teach writing and
arithmetic. In a reforming age St.Paul’s was going to have to
change.

Pressure for radical change came from the Public
Schools Commission of 1861 and later from the Charity Commissioners;
but in any case High Master Kynaston was keen to increase the staff
and broaden the curriculum. His successor, Frederick William
Walker, (then High Master of Manchester Grammar School) was
appointed in 1877 to carry out the major changes that were needed if
the governors were to defend their stewardship to the satisfaction
of the Victorian public, and if St.Paul’s was to remain a great
public school in the heyday of the ‘Public School System’. It
had already been decided that the school must move out of the City.
A sixteen acre site, between what are now the Talgarth and
Hammersmith Roads, was bought for £41,000 and Alfred Waterhouse,
already famous as the architect of the Natural History Museum
(1881), built on it the handsome gothic edifice of red brick and
terra-cotta which was to house St.Paul’s from 1884 to1968.

Under Walker the school grew rapidly in numbers
(211 boys in 1884; 573 in1888) and reputation. If he was right
in seeing the attainment of entrance scholarships to Oxford and
Cambridge as the touchstone of success, then in his day and beyond
St.Paul’s was far the most successful school in England. Other
Victorians, however, believed playing fields to be every bit as
important as lessons. Though Walker certainly did not, the new
site enabled the school to compete athletically as well as
academically. St.Paul’s was already a founding member of the
Rugby Football Union (1871) though games did not become compulsory
until 1897. Boarding, which had disappeared early in the
nineteenth century, was revived at Hammersmith.

In 1909 a science block and in 1934 new biology
laboratories were opened; yet, despite the steady broadening and
modernising of the curriculum, it was on the humanities and
especially the classics that the fame of St.Paul’s in the first half
of the twentieth century mainly rested. Every High Master
until 1962 was a classicist and the best known among Paulines of
this period are predominantly men of letters: G.K.Chesterton,
Leonard Woolf, Compton Mackenzie, Edward Thomas, Lawrence Binyon,
Eric Newby. But there were artists too, such as Paul Nash, who
was unhappy at St.Paul’s, Eric Kennington and Ernest Shephard, who
was happy there. There was also Bernard Law Montgomery.
It was in Walker’s day that St.Paul’s began to admit non-Christians:
the majority of these, and some of the most distinguished of
Paulines, such as Sir Isaiah Berlin, have been Jewish; but Aurbindo
Ghose, who entered the school in 1884, is now venerated by thousands
of Hindus as a saint and a sage.

Montgomery, except at cricket, rugby football and
swimming, was not a distinguished school-boy: he remained a private
in the school’s Cadet Corps. In the months before D-day
however, as General commanding 21st Army Group he returned to its
headquarters in the school buildings to plan the invasion of Europe.
The school itself, meanwhile, had been evacuated, largely by
bicycle, to Crowthorne, in Berkshire. There, until 1945,
masters and boys lived in the village, lessons took place in a
nearby country house, Easthampstead Park, and Wellington College
lent playing fields and laboratories.

It was not only the dilapidation and shabbiness
inflicted by the war on the Hammersmith buildings - seven hundred
windows had been broken - that made the school authorities begin
thinking about yet another move. The broadening of the
Talgarth Road took a slice off playing fields that were already
inadequate; boys had to travel on the Piccadilly line to play games
at Osterley. Art school, science labs., swimming pool - none
could really match what most public schools were beginning to offer.
But a move must not be so far out that it would seriously weaken the
historic links of St.Paul’s with London.

In 1968 the move across the Thames to the present
site took place. Its forty five acres, formerly a waterworks’
reservoir and filter beds, provided ample space for St.Paul’s
Preparatory School, Colet Court, to move too. There was some
talk of moving St.Paul’s Girls School (founded in1904 and endowed by
the Colet Foundation as our sister school); but in the event the
girls remained at Brook Green.

The new buildings, designed by
Bernard Fielden, on the CLASP system, now appear as characteristic
of the brutalist nineteen sixties, perhaps, as Waterhouse’s gothic
pile appeared grotesquely Victorian to our grandparents in
the nineteen thirties. They have been somewhat
mellowed, however, by addition, modification and vegetation.

School and site, from the air

Notable additions include the magnificent Art
School , the Design Technology Centre and the conversion of the
central courtyard into the Atrium (all 1991); the complete
refurbishment of the Theatre (1987) and of the Walker Library
(2000).

Also in 2000 a Rackets court, the first
in the school’s history, was completed. Though St.Paul’s
continues to offer boarding places, the demand is less than in the
Hammersmith days and in 1999 one of the two boarding houses was
demolished to make way for the new Music School and Wathen Hall, a
department and concert hall of which any school could be proud.

Our thanks go to Rev. Mead, not only for
persevering with teaching us history but also for allowing the Lodge
to reproduce this brief history of the school.